The UK Ministry of Defence has spent around £200m rebuilding a jetty at HM Naval Base Portsmouth ready for the arrival of HMS Queen Elizabeth later this year. El Reg got invited to watch an American supply ship test it out.
As the picture further down this story shows, the planned exercise involving US Naval Service ship …

Page:

It's really true UK has no longer a textile sector to protect, but it's good after the Brexit EU borders will be safer against low priced Chinese goods - while Britain will be able to keep on enjoying them, LOL!

Re: sea power

The more interesting question is "How in clucking bell's name could you spend £200m on concrete?". I mean, who the hell is building this and why are they using unsold gold bullion bars from the BoE for the reinforcement struts? Also what is actually wrong with the existing jetties? I can recall (when we actually had a navy) seeing 2 carriers, Ark Royal and Invincible, lined up bow to stern at jetties in Portsmouth, so why can't we use those?

Re: sea power

Perhaps insufficient depth, and a seafloor not easily dredged...the older class of ship had a draft of 27 feet, while this one is rated at 35 feet. The new carrier also has considerably wider hips, 138 feet in the beam versus 95 for Ark Royal. So she'll need more depth and more clearance to the outboard side.

Lastly, the length of the ship (919 feet versus 787) means much more room is needed to turn...even with the help of tugs, it could be the bigger ships just can't be readily made to line up in the slot to slip in beside the jetty. And the older jetty might, possibly, simply be TOO old and weathered to take having a big ship leaning against it anymore. It'd be a bit embarrassing for the RN to have the carrier break off and take the jetty with it for good measure.

Re: sea power

If you can have a large enough carrier group with it to provide anti-missile, anti-submarine and anti-air support to the carrier, yes. But a carrier alone is not effective. It's a massive sitting duck for surface skimming missiles, submarines and air attack (unless the carrier can deploy an effective AWACS and air cover umbrella, which the UK carriers won't be able to due to missing AWACS capability and lack of deployable aircraft)

Re: sea power

Even a minimal force ensure you can keep the needed skills alive - which can be used in time of need to train the necessary larger force. If you lose those skills wholly, recreating them from scratch would be much, much harder, and take a far longer time.

Moreover these ships can be deployed together allied ones to create a much larger and effective force.

It's the same for the industry - once you have no more the trained workers to create what requires specific skills and experience, it far harder - and expensive - to restart from scratch.

Re: sea power

@Skippy, sure, if you want to call the almost up to the job conversion of a helicopter to a sort of AWACS role to be an AWACS capability. A helo simply doesn't provide the same kind of coverage a fixed wing craft like an E-2 can. Which they could have easily deployed (and operated much more cheaply per flying hour) had they built a cat'n'trap ship.

Re: sea power

No, they definitely have an AWACS capability, it might even be on a modern airframe by 2018.

No, they do not. Ask any of the navies which have been using rotor based AWACS and why are they desperately trying to change to fixed wing. Even the Indians whose Kamov-31 has better endurance and higher ceiling than the UK candidates for early warning are looking to switch.

If you do not care to ask, compute the necessary flight resource, spares level and maintenance windows required - you will see that you need to use at least 3 of the very precious slots in the air wing for the rotor AWACS. More like 4. Compared to that you can get away with 2 fixed wing ones which are considerably more capable and have much better endurance too.

Re: sea power

Our USN, will work with the Royal Navy, as we always have, shoulder to shoulder. It's not like you are out there alone. Of all our NATO and Pacific allies, only the Brits have been willing to shoulder their share of the load of strategic deterrence and defense, which is much appreciated, and not to be trivialized.

Re: sea power

@eldakka - "Oh wait, no, I don't."

If I recall, that was NOT a NATO mission (as the post you referenced commented on), it was strictly a British mission going up against a third-rate military power that happened to have obtained some fancy French anti-ship missiles.

Re: "...a local transformer which takes it up from the standard 50Hz to the carriers’ 60Hz..."

Re: "...a local transformer which takes it up from the standard 50Hz to the carriers’ 60Hz..."

'And why is the carrier using US style 60 Hz when it should be a properly British 50 Hz?'

There's all sorts of electrickery on modern warships, 400VAC, 120VAC, 240VAC in a range of frequencies. With electric drive to the propellers I'd guess there's some bigger numbers in there as well. UK mains voltage is just a small part of the mix.

From very vague memories of the T45 power system I think all the generation is done at the same voltage and frequency irrespective of source and then fed to a busbar from which the various supplies are fed and converted as required.

Re: "...a local transformer which takes it up from the standard 50Hz to the carriers’ 60Hz..."

A really poor decision not to build the QE class carriers with nuclear powered propulsion but hey this is admiralty spec, they can't even make their mind up what cake they want when the tea trolley comes round.

I suspect it's because a) we don't have the technology and the Yanks wouldn't sell it to us, and b) a major use for our large warships these days appears to be friendly visits and flag waving, and many countries won't let nuclear powered ships into their territorial waters.